Traditional Atomic Theory

Posted by jns on 16 June 2005

Reminding us that atoms were “just a theory” until the twentieth century when experiment finally established atomic reality (in some quantum mechanical sense yet to be understood fully):

But as late as 1894, when Robert Cecil, the third Marquis of Salisbury, chancellor of Oxford and former Prime Minister of England, catalogued the unfinished business of science in his presidential address to the British Association, whether atoms were real or only convenient and what structure they hid were still undecided issues:

“What the atom of each element is, whether it is a movement, or a thing, or a vortex, or a point having intertia, whether there is any limit to its divisibility, and, if so, how that limit is imposed, whether the long list of elements is final, or whether any of them have any common origin, all these questions remain surrounded by a darkness as profound as ever.”

[Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986) p. 31.]

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^*Perhaps the idea of atoms is the oldest surviving scientific concept in that “just a theory” category — far older certainly than the continually changing, ever evolving “traditional marriage”.